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Bullet graph

How can we improve a bar chart? Of course, it depends on what we want to achieve.

Maps that grow out of trees: data visualisation as an artform

In the previous PS blog “Trees that grow out of tables”, Janusz Wachnicki described how a good understanding of the humble crosstab can help us utilise classification trees more effectively. When it comes to visualisation, can classification results be presented any other way than in a tree? The an…

Speedometers in reporting

Speedometers, or gauges, are very intuitive hence their popularity in dashboarding. But they evoke mixed feelings among analysts.

SNA or network as an analytical object

Today, we will look into Social Network Analysis (SNA), or Social Relation Analysis.

A table or a chart? Why not both? Hollywood film production costs and the use of a combined table chart

Thermometers on dashboards

What are the markers of a good dashboard? Why use a thermometer in it?

Visualising decision trees: the classic refurbished

In this post, we continue to discuss the visualisation of nested hierarchical data. In my previous blog, I showed how hierarchical data can be presented in a two-dimensional space as a treemap. This approach, however, has some limitations, namely the number of nesting levels. The treemap can handle…

Story of a pie

You may not know this but this year is the 217th birthday of the humble pie chart. Its first known, and purposeful, application was the visualisation of the geographical distribution of the Turkish Empire across three continents: Asia, Europe, and Africa. It was first presented in Statistical Brevi…

The Marimekko chart or analytical patchwork

What data can we show on a regular bar chart? How many variables can we use? For those who answered ‘not enough’ the Marimekko chart may be the answer.

Which car to buy: marginal gains from chart margins